


Far Away, Long Ago

by mombasas



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Amnesia, Anastasia AU, Ba Sing Se, Blue Spirit Zuko (Avatar), Firelord Iroh (Avatar), Identity Porn, M/M, Road Trips, idiots to lovers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-14 23:41:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29304393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mombasas/pseuds/mombasas
Summary: An Anastasia AU in which Sokka schemes, Toph teaches, and their new amnesiac friend Li bears a striking resemblance to the lost prince of the Fire Nation.“This is Toph,” Sokka introduces. “She’s gonna teach you how to act like somebody with class.”“Sup,” says Toph, and belches. “I want a third of the cash.” Li takes a step back.
Relationships: Sokka/Zuko (Avatar), toph/kicking ass
Comments: 33
Kudos: 193





	1. Chapter 1

There’s a man staring at Li. That isn’t unusual; his scar, which covers close to a third of his face, draws gazes more often than not. Most people have the courtesy to look away quickly, though, once they realize he’s glaring back at them. This guy seems oblivious and what’s worse, he and the pale kid he’s sitting with clearly haven’t been served yet.

Li, half-hidden behind the server stand and lighting tealights with his finger, grits his teeth. He waits until the last candle’s wick has caught before shaking out his hand, grabbing his tray, and forcing himself to head over. The crowd in Pao’s is almost deafening, the early evening rush packing every table so that he has to turn sideways and raise the platter of glasses above his head just to squeeze through.

“What can I get you?” he asks when he’s close enough to be heard over the din. The kid sitting next to the staring guy has a flying lemur clinging to his bald head. Sure, Li thinks. Why not. It's been that kind of day. He is going to crash so hard when he gets home tonight that he's not even going to have time to lament how thin his bedroll is. With the hand not holding the tray, he begins setting out glasses and a full pitcher of water.

“I'll have the tea,” the guy says. He’s still staring, deep blue eyes locked on Li’s face, and he clearly hasn’t so much as glanced at the menu.

“What kind. Of tea,” Li grinds out.

“We’ll try the jasmine!” the guy’s friend says, but he’s interrupted almost immediately.

“What’s your name?”

 _That is absolutely none of anybody’s business_ , Li thinks. Instead of saying that aloud, he glances pointedly down at his chest, where there’s a little pin with the Pao’s Teahouse logo on it next to his name.

“Huh.” The guy’s brows furrow briefly before they smooth out again. “What’s your family like, Li?”

“Couldn’t tell you,” Li says shortly. “Would you like any tea cakes?”

The guy ignores this. “Where were you in 94?”

“Somewhere less annoying than here,” Li says, and then leaves to put the order in. Screw the tip; he’s giving this table of absolute weirdos to Ming.

*

They’re waiting for him outside after his shift like he owes them money.

What would a normal, law-abiding Earth Kingdom citizen do in this situation?

“I’m gonna… call the guard,” he says unconvincingly. Li has never called the guard in his life and he’s not about to start now, but saying “I’m the vigilante known as the Blue Spirit and I will put both of you through that wall if you don’t stop following me and asking insane questions” is probably not the best idea, and Li’s trying out this new lifestyle where he thinks things through before taking action. It’s not a natural talent of his, so it takes a lot of effort.

Then the guy, who doesn't even have the decency to act concerned, asks him, “Anyone ever tell you that you look a lot like the Fire Prince?” and the situation resolves itself into clarity. _Ohh_ , Li realizes, with some relief. _He’s crazy._

“Okay, sir, you’re confused,” Li tells him, trying to make his voice kind. Or at least less angry, which is kind of its default setting. Resting bitch voice, Jin once called it, to go with his face, which is when Li pushed her into the fountain.

“Wait, Sokka, what?” the guy’s lemur-bedecked friend asks.

The guy—Sokka, apparently—produces a battered scroll with some kind of portrait on it, which he proceeds to unfurl and hold distractingly close to Li’s face. “Aang. Look. He’s got the hair, the mouth looks right, the _eyes_ —you’re what, seventeen, eighteen?”

Taken aback, Li nods.

“He’s the right age,” Sokka continues. “And he’s a firebender. Scar’s new, but it’s been eight years since anyone’s seen the prince! Who knows what kind of wacky hijinks he’s gotten involved in since then!”

“Hang on,” Li interjects, half because it’s so weird to hear someone discussing his scar casually and half because both Aang and his lemur are starting to look between the image on the scroll and Li’s face with wide, credulous eyes. “I’m not a _prince_.”

“How do you know?” Li opens his mouth to retort and then is forced to shut it again when no words are forthcoming. Sokka presses his advantage. “You said you didn’t know your family. But you’re Fire Nation, right?”

Li glares at him some more, but it doesn’t seem to have an effect. “I don’t—I don’t remember anything from before I was ten years old,” he admits reluctantly. “I was found in Jang Hui with no memory. I came to Ba Sing Se to learn about my past.”

“Maybe this _is_ your past!” Sokka exclaims.

“You’re insane,” Li says flatly, but then Sokka is flipping the scroll around and suddenly he's faced with a decade-old portrait of the royal family: the former Fire Lord and Lady and two children, one of whom—well, he doesn't look entirely _unlike_ Li, but he's also only six or seven years old, standing just in front of his parents with Fire Prince Ozai's hand clamped on his shoulder. His hair is long, pulled back into a phoenix plume. His face is unscarred, both eyes clear and shaded with bright pigment. Li looks at the cleanness of the boy's skin, the unmarred sweep of his left cheekbone. He doesn't know him, doesn't recognize himself in any part of the boy except, perhaps, the eyes. Li's never seen anyone else with eyes the color of his own: a burnished, glowing gold.

"He's dead. The whole family died," he says anyway. This is true; even on the outskirts of the colonies—even in Jang Hui—schools included the Caldera riots in the curriculum. The story is probably just as familiar to Sokka and Aang as it is to Li. The death of Crown Prince Lu Ten, his father’s abandonment of the war, and then the night Fire Lord Iroh came to power: the news of Azulon’s death, the rumors, the riots, the ruling family ripping into itself until there was nothing left, not even the children. Nothing except Iroh alone, still traveling back to the islands from Ba Sing Se.

The story is common knowledge. It still makes Li’s chest tighten.

“They never found a body,” Sokka points out, which is also common knowledge. “And Fire Lord Iroh doesn't think he’s dead. He’s offering a thousand gold pieces to anyone who can bring him news about his nephew. Think how happy he'll be when we bring him _his actual nephew._ ”

Li takes a moment to digest this. “And you want me—what, you want me to pretend to be that nephew? Why?”

“It’s not pretending,” Sokka hedges. “You might really be the prince! You said yourself you don't remember anything about your past. But you'd need to be convincing enough to get in to see Iroh. He's the Fire Lord; they don't just let anybody walk in there.”

Li has no idea how much experience Sokka has with Fire Nation customs. Probably just as much as Li, which is to say, basically none at all. But he’s willing to bet Sokka’s right about that. Aang is still watching their exchange with wide eyes, but he’s staying silent for now, which is almost more concerning than Sokka’s endless flow of questions and arguments, all of them sounding so reasonable that Li’s hard-pressed to remember exactly why he was so against this plan in the first place.

Oh, wait. It’s because the plan is stupid.

“No deal,” Li says. He makes his voice firm, tries to give off the don’t-fuck-with-me vibes that come more naturally when he's behind a wooden theater mask.

Despite this, he’s surprised— _not_ disappointed—when Sokka appears to give up on convincing him at last. He turns, wrapping an arm around a confused Aang's shoulders, and heads for the open end of the alley. “That's fine!” he says airily, not turning around. “I guess we'll just find someone else to give an all-expenses-paid trip to the Fire Nation capital, home of every national census roll ever recorded!”

Li clenches his fists. He waits a moment, then two, then three; Sokka and Aang are moving further and further away.

“What's in it for you?” he calls, when they're nearly reached the main street. 

Sokka half-turns to face him again. “Cash reward, remember?” 

“This is so—this is so stupid. There’s no way I’m some lost prince. Why are you—” He makes a noise of frustration. Words have never come easily to him but Sokka and his absurd schemes are making expressing his thoughts even more difficult than usual.

“Look," Sokka says, when it becomes obvious that Li isn't going to develop the capacity for coherent speech anytime soon. “As far as I can tell, this is a win-win for you. Maybe you find your family. Or maybe Iroh says you’re not his nephew. You’re still in the Caldera; maybe you can use their resources to find a new lead, since Ba Sing Se clearly isn’t working. Where better to find information about Fire Nation colonials than the Fire Nation?” Sokka looks at him expectantly.

Oh, spirits. “You're paying for travel.”

“We'll pay for travel,” Sokka agrees, and then stops and looks at Aang. “Well.”

"Oh, I'm in," Aang assures him. "I like Fire Lord Iroh! And I really want to get out of Ba Sing Se," he says, brow creasing. "I hate it here. It's time the Avatar checked in on the Fire Nation, anyway."

Several pieces slot into place in Li's brain. “You’re the _Avatar_?”

Aang looks a little crestfallen. “You didn't recognize me?” 

“Not everybody carries around portraits of major international figureheads,” Li says defensively.

Sokka doesn’t acknowledge the dig. “He's literally _the_ airbender. He's got—” He gestures at his forehead. 

What he's got, Li thinks, is a lemur covering everything down to his eyebrows. "I don't know how to tell you this," he says instead, "but the Avatar hasn't exactly been at the top of my list of priorities lately. No offense."

This is true but it makes him feel a little bad to say it. It's not that he doesn't care about international politics, it's just that they don't seem to care much about him. He works at a tea house, saves pretty much all of his wages to pay the stupid-high rent on his stupid-small room in the Lower Ring, and sometimes, when he's feeling particularly claustrophobic, he puts on a mask and commits knife crime in the name of public safety. It's not much, but it's his life, and Li doesn't think the Avatar has much to do with it.

He barely remembers the year Fire Lord Iroh took the throne; he was ten, and alone, and missing all of his memories, and freshly fished out of the Jang Hui River. The burn that stretches across his face was raw and new and so painful that he often couldn't sleep. But he recalls enough to know that the Avatar reappeared a few years after Iroh's ascension, after the months of civil unrest that followed the Caldera riots as the Fire Nation troops were pulled out of the Earth Kingdom like poison drawn from a wound.

Now, almost a decade later, the world has settled into a tentative peace. It's Iroh's wise, gentle reign, and the Avatar's reappearance in its fifth year, that have finally accomplished what the six-hundred-day siege failed to do: Ba Sing Se, and the Earth Kingdom as a whole, are open to firebenders like Li. But people like him and Jin are still poor; by all accounts, the Ba Sing Se guards are as corrupt as they were during the war; Li still spends his weekends stealing from city officials who treat the welfare budget like their own personal bank account. He gets rid of the evidence every time, taking the long way home and slipping coins and jewelry into the hands of the beggars that line every street in the Lower Ring.

The Avatar's never cared before, and from what Li can see, he doesn't seem to care much now. Or maybe he just doesn't know, Li thinks, looking at the baby fat still clinging to Aang's face. Spirits, he's young. Younger than Li, anyway, which is young enough. If he's here on official business, he must be staying in the Upper Ring; it’s not likely that he's spent much, if any, time in the slums that comprise the Lower Ring. And it's not like Li’s a paragon of community outreach himself. He mostly steals because he's bored and trapped and with every passing day, his chance to know his past—to know his family—slips further and further away.

It's this thought that makes up his mind.

“Okay,” he says. “I'm in."

*

After his room was broken into for the second time, Li learned to carry everything important with him. Jin is out of the city, visiting her sister. There’s nothing to keep him there and now that he’s allowed the thought of leaving the city to take root in his mind, it’s all he wants. So when Sokka asks him if he needs to take care of anything before they leave, he shakes his head, adjusts the straps of his bag, and follows them.

They make it a whole block before he groans, backtracks, and ducks into the teahouse one last time to inform Pao that he’s quitting, because he’s not going to do that to his coworkers, and to ask Ming to tell Jin that he’s traveling, not dead, just in case she ever makes it back to the city. _Then_ they leave.

Li is wrong, it turns out, about where the Avatar and his companions are living while they're in Ba Sing Se. They ride the monorail south, through the slightly shabbier outer circles of the Middle Ring, and continue on through the Lower. Li spends the first twenty minutes of the journey silently fuming about how convenient the monorail is—as convenient as it is out of his price range. Li and everyone else he knows lucky enough to have a job serving the upper ranks of Ba Sing Se make their daily pilgrimage to the inner city by foot. It takes him nearly an hour each way but only forty minutes if he goes by way of rooftops, which he tries not to do unless he’s really late, lest anyone connect him to his masked alter ego. 

By the time he’s stopped stewing in the injustice of this, the monorail is passing through the final inner wall and slowing to a stop at a small exposed platform. It’s surrounded by tall grass that ripples like water in the fresh evening breeze, so different from the stale air of the Lower and Middle Rings, crowded with the smell of too many people living in close quarters. The outer wall of Ba Sing Se is so distant that for a moment, Li thinks they've left the city entirely.

"This is us," Sokka says, unnecessarily. The car had gotten progressively emptier as they left the wealthier parts of the city behind; this is clearly the last stop on the monorail's route. They leave the platform behind and set out along a dirt road that arrows out into the fields, until suddenly the grass drops away and Li finds himself in a flat clearing.

Two small tents and an exposed bedroll are positioned around a small campfire. Traveling bags are heaped in a haphazard pile nearby, and there's a girl with Sokka's dark skin and cheekbones and blue eyes—his sister?—poking dubiously at the contents of a cookpot.

"Wow," Li says, instead of what he's thinking, which is a big interrogative with the words _You all live like this?_ in front of it. "I would have thought the Earth King would put the Avatar up somewhere more... fancy."

“He tried,” Aang says. “But there wasn't room for Appa.” This is the fifth time the kid’s mentioned Appa since they met. Li doesn’t know if Appa is a human, animal, or object, and at this point he’s not going to ask.

“It was a really nice house,” says the girl, regretful.

“There were goose-down pillows,” Sokka puts in. “And running water.”

“But it’s worth it to be out here, right, guys?" Aang asks, beaming at them and throwing his arms out to encompass the grassy hillocks of the agrarian zone.

“Yep,” Sokka says, unconvincingly. “Love nature. Love to be in it twenty-four hours a day.” Aang turns his wide smile on him and Sokka manages a weak thumbs-up before quickly changing the subject. “Katara, this is Li, we found him in a teahouse. Li, this is Katara, the most annoying sister in the world.”

On the basis of that introduction alone, Li suspects that he and Katara will probably get along fine.

Sokka takes it upon himself to explain the plan to Katara over dinner. It sounds even worse the second time. When he's done, Katara's mouth has drawn itself into a single flat line, and Aang's forehead is creased into a little frown again. The occasional snap of the campfire and the drone of cicadapedes fills the silence. Long golden rays spill across the fields as the last sliver of the sun finally sinks below the horizon. Li feels it go.

“I don’t know, guys,” Aang says hesitantly. “This feels… bad. I don’t want to hurt Fire Lord Iroh.”

“We’re not gonna hurt him,” Sokka protests. “The old guy misses his nephew! We’re reuniting a family!”

“But that’s not his nephew,” says Katara, pointing at Li. “ _That_ is a random firebender you found in a tea shop.” Li folds his arms over his chest tightly and tries not to take offense at the fact that they’re all discussing him like he’s not sitting right there.

“Okay, first of all, we don’t know he’s not the Fire Prince,” Sokka says. “Li says he can’t remember anything from his past, so maybe he _is_ the missing prince, hmm?” When this argument fails to impress even Aang, Sokka presses on quickly. “And B, does it even matter? The prince was only ten when he disappeared, and the Fire Lord hadn’t seen him for years even before then! He has no idea what this kid would be like now. He gets a loving nephew, Li here gets a life of luxury, and we get the reward of knowing we made an old man happy. And also the reward of money.”

It’s a pretty stupid plan, Li thinks again. Little kid or not, there’s no way the Fire Lord won’t recognize his own nephew. He’ll know right away that Li’s an imposter. Katara must conclude the same thing, because she rolls her eyes but doesn't protest further. _If you_ are _an imposter_ , says a quiet, hopeful voice in his head. _Maybe you really are the lost prince. Maybe the Fire Lord really is your family._ He stomps on the voice with ruthless efficiency born of long experience. They’ll go to the Caldera, Fire Lord Iroh will take one look at him and know Li isn’t his nephew, and that’ll be it.

“There’s one major flaw in this plan,” Li points out testily, instead of saying any of that out loud. “I’ve never even stepped foot in the Caldera before. I’m about as far from royalty as it gets. I have no idea how the—the _Fire Prince_ —would act. I’m from _Jang Hui_ ,” he stresses.

Sokka dismisses him with a wave of his hand. “Please. I’m the plan guy.” He tugs his leather bag closer and then upends it; dozens of crumpled scrolls cascade out onto the ground. Katara sighs. “You’re gonna memorize these until you can recite Sozin’s entire family line in your sleep, buddy.”

“I changed my mind,” Li says. “I’m out.”

“Free trip to the Fire Nation,” Sokka says, and then adds, “one thousand gold pieces,” kind of meanly, and throws in a pointed look at Li’s patched shirt, which is clean but so old it’s nearly transparent. Li scowls. "That's what I thought, your highness," Sokka says, and grins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sokka: what’s your name?  
> li: there are some things i keep to myself, that are my business...


	2. Chapter 2

Appa, it turns out, is a ten-ton air bison. He glides down out of the sky after dinner, flat tail carving the air like a rudder through water, and alights on the ground much more softly than should be possible for an animal of his size. He’s airbending, Li realizes, and watches the way Aang bounds over and rests his forehead against the bison’s. Sokka and Katara are busy quarreling over the dishes, so he picks his way across the campground and over to where the Avatar stands on his tiptoes with his face pressed against Appa's white fur.

“Hey,” Li says, waving a little awkwardly.

“Oh!” Aang perks up, turning to smile at Li so widely that his eyes crinkle. “This is Appa! Appa, this is Li, he's gonna travel with us for a while. You up for some flying tomorrow, buddy?" Appa huffs at him happily. Li gets it. He's known this kid for a total of five hours and he already suspects he’d commit a murder for him, if necessary.

“Can I—” Li gestures vaguely at the entirety of the bison, but Aang seems to understand him fine.

“Yeah!” he says cheerfully. "Appa loves pets, don't you?" He gives the animal an affectionate scritch on the nose and is rewarded with an explosive sneeze that sends him floating a few feet backwards and covers him in bison snot. He's laughing before his feet even touch the ground again. "Gross!" he enthuses, and goes off to show Katara.

Li raises one hand slowly, making sure he's squarely in Appa's line of sight before reaching out to touch the bison's furry side. When this doesn't seem to bother him, he begins carding his fingers through the windswept fur.

“I'm Li,” he says quietly. “Uh, I guess Aang just told you that. Your fur is really soft.” Appa whuffles at him contentedly before yawning so hugely that Li can see his flat molars.

He spends a while just petting the bison, occasionally untangling bits of his fur. The motion is calming, and Appa dozes contentedly, occasionally sighing out sleepy puffs of hay-scented air. There's a noise behind them and Li startles, looking up to find that the sky has darkened without him noticing. Sokka is standing a little ways away, apparently having lost his fight with Katara; he's dripping wet and their dinner dishes are piled in his arms.

"Want help?" Li offers. Katara cooked; it's only fair.

“Huh? Oh, the dishes. What's in it for you?” Sokka looks at him suspiciously, which is rich, Li thinks, coming from the guy who basically kidnapped him from his place of work. Plus he’s still bitter about Sokka’s below-the-belt hit at his clothes. It's not Li’s fault he's poor, it's the bourgeoisie’s.

“I forgot,” he deadpans. “Royalty doesn't do manual labor.” Then he walks back over to the campsite, leaving Sokka spluttering behind him.

*

Li loves flying, loves the way the world unfolds itself beneath them. He knows better than to let himself believe in it, but traveling—the sense of forward momentum, of finally going _somewhere_ —is almost enough to make him feel like he's making some kind of progress towards understanding his past.

Sokka begins teaching him right away. “Teaching” is a pretty generous term for it, Li thinks, but he doesn’t protest, just studies the scrolls Sokka passes him and answers Sokka’s quizzes the best he can.

“Your father?”

“Prince Ozai, son of Azulon and Ilah, descendant of Sozin,” Li recites.

“Mother?”

"Ursa, daughter of Jinzuk and Rina, descendant of Roku."

"Sister?"

"Azula."

"Whose favorite color was...."

“... blue?” Li tries, trying to remember what was written on the scroll. He’d attempted to study it, really, but Sokka had chosen the hours after sunrise to practice his sword fighting and Li had spent most of the morning physically restraining himself from going over and telling Sokka everything he was doing wrong, and also suggesting that he put a shirt on, because—because. Just because.

“Red,” Sokka says, looking at him sternly.

“How do you even know the princess's favorite color?” Li complains. It’s not a whine, whatever Katara’s amused expression says.

Sokka waves another scroll in his face. “It says so right here.”

Li seizes it, unfurls the paper, and then promptly rolls it up again in disgust. "You have got to be kidding me. You're using _Caldera Nights_ as your source?"

"It's a historical document," Sokka says in a lofty tone.

"It's an affront to the dramatic arts," Li corrects him. "This is literally one of the worst plays to come out of the Fire Kingdom, ever."

"It's not that bad," Sokka protests. "There's that cool fight scene in the volcano—"

"Stop talking," Li begs. "Please."

"It's got two whole acts about the night of the prince's disappearance. _Your_ disappearance."

 _My disappearance_ , Li thinks. It's a nicer way to put things than what Sokka could have called that night: “that time the entire royal family killed each other under circumstances that remain mysterious almost a decade later, destabilizing the Fire Nation’s martial hold over the world and ushering in the first peaceful years the Nation had known since Sozin.”

Li brushes this aside. “Those two acts are entirely comprised of Ursa sobbing in her dressing chamber and Azulon's four-hundred line soliloquy. Four hundred lines, Sokka. And the meter is irregular, but not in a purposeful way. Not like they're trying to suggest that his grasp on reality was deteriorating. Wei Lee was just too lazy to bother with consistent meter.”

Sokka is staring at him like he has two heads.

“Meter matters,” Li tells him. “Form informs content.”

"Ohh-kay," Sokka says in a tone he probably thinks is placating. Li has heard him try it on Katara and does not appreciate Sokka trying it on him. “Well, it's still a good source of information on the royal family. And I'm cross-referencing it,” he adds, pulling out another handful of scrolls from his bag, “with these.”

Li catches a glimpse of the label on one of the texts. It's _The Fire-Lily's Bride_ , which is insipid, and insulting, and one of the few examples of Fire Nation restoration drama that Li hates more than _Caldera Nights_.

“I’m going to throw those over the side,” he says calmly, and lunges for Sokka.

*

It's not a dignified fight and by the time it’s over, Sokka has nearly fallen out of Appa’s saddle, Li's face is bloody from where Sokka's elbow got him in the nose, and, worst of all, the scrolls remain perfectly intact, if a little crumpled. Another poorly thought-out plan, he berates himself. Aang brings Appa down to land for the night before Li can gather his nerve to try again.

In what he's beginning to suspect is a Water Tribe tradition, Katara and Sokka argue over dinner.

“It's your turn to write to Mom,” the waterbender insists.

“No way,” says Sokka, leaning back against a rock and crossing his arms behind his head. “I wrote to her when we left Omashu.”

“And I wrote to her when we got to Ba Sing Se, which means—stay with me here—it’s _your_ turn.”

Li tunes out their squabbling and focuses more than he needs to on stoking the flames of the campfire. Idly, he shapes animals in the sparks that float above it—a platypus-bear, his best approximation of Appa, then Momo, Aang's flying lemur. Across from him, Aang is watching the fire, face unusually serious even when Li makes spark-Momo flick its tail. Li realizes Aang is doing the same thing he is: his level best to not think too hard about the effortless display of sibling intimacy beside them.

He remembers, abruptly, that Aang is the _last_ airbender. Everyone knows that the Air Nomads had a flexible idea of family, but he assumes Aang had some kind of community in the sky temples. There must have been adults who cared about him, friends who loved him. Aang glances up, sees him looking, and flashes a small smile. For a moment, he looks far older than his sixteen years, and lonelier than Li would ever have guessed.

“Sokka and Katara found me in an iceberg.” Aang speaks so quietly that Li has to angle his good ear to hear him over the sound of their bickering. “I ran away from the Air Temple when I was twelve, and there was a storm, and Appa and I—” He breaks off. “When Katara, uh, melted me, I couldn't believe a hundred years had passed. It was—for me, it was a blink. And then I was alone. I didn't have anyone, and there was nobody left to remember me.” He slants a look at Li, who very carefully keeps his gaze trained on the fire. “But I wasn't alone, actually,” he continues. “Because Sokka and Katara wouldn’t let me be. And their family is really, really nice. Kya makes these disgusting sea prunes but nobody tells her they’re terrible because she's so proud of them, and Hakoda gave me this cool carving of a tiger seal.”

He takes a long, shaky breath. “It isn't—it isn’t the same. And I don't know what I'm doing, and everything in the world is so much angrier than it was when I left the temple, and there was a war and a lot of people died, and I just _slept through it_. But. I’m not alone, even if it feels like it, sometimes. They love each other, and they love me, too. There are people who love me. I have a family.” There's surety in his voice, and Li doesn't know what to say in the face of it. He _never_ knows what to say. As the silence between them lengthens, Aang laughs awkwardly. “Wow.” He rubs a pale hand over his head and exhales loudly. “Who knows where _that_ came from.”

“Thank you for telling me,” Li says, finally, and means it.

*

That night Li has a dream. It’s one he’s had before, which isn’t uncommon; for a while, during his childhood, he cycled through a handful of blurry dream scenes each week, predictable in their unpredictability. There’s never a narrative, only fragments of images and sensations. A beam of sunlight falling on a stone wall, the shadow of a tree branch spiderwebbing through it. A flickering wall of fire. The smell of jasmine, vetiver, and smoke. A child’s mouth tilted up in a sly smile. In this one, he’s kneeling on a cool marble floor. That’s it; that's the whole dream. He just stays there, on his knees, not feeling fear or hope or _anything_ , until he awakens from the dream like a pearl diver surfacing for air. When he was a child, waking would be followed by frustration; he was so sure the dreams were clues to his past, and equally sure he’d never be able to decipher them. Now he just feels confused and annoyed. Every time the yearning unfurls in his chest, he has to spend a few minutes stomping it down ruthlessly before he can get up and start the day.

It’s strange that the dreams would come back now. He hasn't had them in years, not since before he left Jang Hui. But maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise; he’s thought more about the blank expanse of his past in the past few days than he has in years. In his quietest moments—drowsing on Appa's sun-warmed back, in the soft darkness of the tent he shares with Sokka, heartbeats before sleep—he can't help filling it in, like an empty scroll begging for ink, a bucket asking to be filled. He imagines siblings, aunts, uncles. Parents who would look at him with pride, pride that he survived, that he made a life for himself, that he tries to be honorable and kind and strong. He wonders if they ever think about him the way he does about them. If they're even alive.

Li’s days take on a predictable routine. He wakes up, meditates, and pries Sokka out of bed, sometimes literally, in time to eat whatever Katara’s found for breakfast. Then he and Sokka pack up their bags while Aang uses his waterbending to wash the dishes. They pile onto Appa, Aang pats him on his broad, fuzzy head, and then they’re airborne.

Sokka has a frankly incomprehensible attachment to what he calls a study schedule but which is in fact a thirty-page color-coded booklet. Every morning he spreads it out on Appa’s back, brow furrowed, and makes minute adjustments to it, muttering the whole time. Li stays away for this part. Eventually, they get to the actual studying.

Sokka is still relying on terrible, terrible theater scrolls, which means that Li is still required to correct him and also educate him on dramatic history. Sokka does not appear to be developing an appreciation for the performing arts but he does let Li go off on whatever tangent he likes, usually looking at him with that strange expression until Li realizes what he’s doing and awkwardly stumbles to a halt.

The historical inaccuracies are another thing entirely. They, too, are a source of argument, but a worse one, because Li always loses. It goes like this: Sokka makes an absolutely insane statement, like _Fire Lord Azulon enjoyed vacationing on the sandy beaches of Ember Island_ , and then Li has to tell him that’s bullshit, and then Sokka says something acerbic like _, And how would_ you _know what Fire Lord Azulon liked to do on vacation?_ and Li blinks like an idiot because he just... does not have an answer. Because he doesn't _know_ how he knows, and the moment he tries to trace the feeling back to some kind of source, his certainty vanishes and leaves a headache in its wake. 

“You can't just headcanon your way through the history of the royal family,” Sokka has the nerve to chastise him one afternoon.

“I'm going to kill you in your sleep,” Li replies.

Sokka waves him off. “Heard that one before,” he says, and moves on to quizzing him about Prince Ozai’s favorite foods.


	3. Chapter 3

A week after he decides to run a con—a benevolent, benign con, but a con nonetheless—on Fire Lord Iroh, Dragon of the West and ruler of the Fire Nation, Sokka wakes up to the sound of Li rummaging in his travel bag. The firebender is half-dressed and sleep-rumpled, but even so, he looks more awake than Sokka is at noon, let alone whatever La-forsaken hour it is right now. Sokka groans an inarticulate question.

“Sun’s up,” Li says, not bothering to look over his shoulder at where Sokka is blinking blearily at him. Sokka groans again, this time because it’s too early for any kind of brain-to-mouth filter, and Li’s found the shirt he was looking for and is pulling it over his stupidly chiseled chest. Who even looks like that, working at a tea shop?

“Wha?” he tries, when it becomes evident that Li has no intention of offering any further explanation.

“Sun’s up,” Li repeats, and then stands and ducks out of the tent.

This is not the weirdest interaction Sokka has had with Li. Pretty much every interaction they've had, actually—including their very first one, a disaster for which Sokka refuses to take full responsibility—is weird. And frustrating.

Li gets up with the sun, every day, and then spends hours meditating like he's the monk in their little group, not Aang. He sits cross-legged and straight-spined, face tilted upwards, breathing so slowly Sokka can barely detect the rise and fall of his chest.

The first time he pushed the sealskin flap of the tent aside to be greeted with Morning Li, Sokka had stopped so suddenly he almost tripped. The new, golden light of dawn had caught on the sharp planes of Li's face. His breath was steaming slightly, wisps of vapor twisting up into the cooler air. Sokka had felt the air leave his own lungs in response.

At first, he'd been so struck by the firebender's resemblance to the lost prince of the Fire Nation that it was all he could see: Li's face overlaid with the portrait's, the solution to a scheme he hadn't even fully realized he was concocting until he and Aang walked into that teahouse. Now, though. Now he sees Li. Awkward and messy-haired and practically glowing in the rosy light of morning, completely separate from Sokka's longtime obsession with the fate of the royal family. Morning Li is the absolute worst thing that has ever happened to him.

Sokka wakes an indeterminate time after Li leaves the tent, though the pale light filtering in through the seams of the sealskin tells him it's still relatively early. He sits up, stretches, rubs a hand over his face, and forces himself out of the tent and into the day, where Li waits, just like he does every morning, utterly unaware of Sokka's gaze. After a week of traveling together, of sleeping in the same too-small tent, he's got his reaction down to a short catch of his breath, a brief skip in his heartbeat.

 _I have made a terrible mistake_ , Sokka thinks, and then gets right on ignoring that.

Sunset finds Appa landing in an untilled field an hour south of Omashu. Aang wanted to go into the city proper, but Katara and Sokka, exchanging a glance that managed to convey their mutual desire to avoid King Bumi at all costs, overruled him. Li was excused from the vote by virtue of being asleep, curled up against the side of Appa's saddle. Sokka, who had been woken twice in the night by Li's tossing and turning, let him sleep.

They're making progress, kind of, except for the minor inconvenience that is Li arguing with him about absolutely _everything_. The best way to catch fish. Fire Lord Iroh's pet peeves. The layout of the palace.

"I don't understand why you're being so unreasonable about this," Sokka had snapped earlier that day. "You don't even have evidence!"

"I don't know, Sokka!" Frustration sharpened Li's tone. Sitting cross-legged on Appa's back, he was practically submerged in a mountain of paper.

In the days following the Caldera riots, a healthy underground market had sprung up trading in anything that had even the slightest association with the dead royal family. Almost a decade later, the market is still flourishing, fed by rumors of the prince's survival. The closer they get to the Fire Nation, the more Sokka finds. In addition to the dramatic reenactments—which are perfectly serviceable, no matter what Li says—his collection now includes commemorative booklets, multiple "eyewitness accounts" of the fateful night, all of which disagree on key points, half a dozen biographies of various family members that contradict each other just as often, and a tarnished brass hairpin that had once, the seller assured him, been a treasured belonging of the long-deceased Fire Lady Ilah.

"I must have read it in one of these," Li had said. "They're all blurring together." He dropped the pamphlet he held, and Sokka eyeballed its now slightly charred edges.

"Maybe we should take a break," Aang had suggested, looking between them anxiously.

Sokka recognizes that he and Li are pretty much one needling comment away from a fistfight at all times, so Aang's concern is not unfounded. Still, it makes for slow going, and, Sokka thinks the next morning, looking at his study schedule despairingly, he's going to have to rearrange things _again_ if he wants to get through the events surrounding the birth of Princess Azula—the public ceremony, the naming ritual, the celebrations—by the time they stop for the night.

He sighs, tries to think analytically. He can make this work.

“Sokka, this isn’t going to work,” Katara says, coming up behind him.

“What? We just need to drill some more,” he protests. “He’ll get it down eventually.”

“No, I mean—look at him.”

Sokka looks. The sunrise gilds the hilltop with a misty glow and Li glows too, silhouetted where he stands over the earthen trough that they’ve been using as a communal water fountain. He raises his cupped hands to his mouth, drinks deeply, and then draws his sleeve across his lips before stomping back over to the remains of last night’s small campfire and dropping down to sit on the grass. When he notices Sokka staring at him, he flips him off. Sokka automatically starts to return the gesture. Impatient, Katara slaps his arm back down.

"See?"

Li is now breathing fire back into the cold embers, eyes focused and sparks flickering from his parted lips. Sokka registers that he is probably not seeing the same thing Katara is, and forcibly adjusts his perspective. “Oh. Ohhhhhh. Crap,” he says.

“Yeah.” Katara looks grimly satisfied. “You can make him memorize as many names as you want, but he’s never gonna pass for nobility with those manners.”

“Everyone underestimates me,” Sokka complains, and goes to see a guy about an earthbender.

*

Twelve hours and one eardrum-shattering Earth Rumble later, Sokka is proudly introducing Li to the newest member of the team.

“This is Toph,” he says. “She’s gonna teach you how to act like somebody with class.”

“Sup,” says Toph, and belches. “I want a third of the cash.” Li takes a step back.

“What?” Sokka says. “No way. You’ll get a fifth, we’re splitting it equally.”

“I’m blind, not stupid.” Toph uncrosses her arms so she can count on her fingers, dark eyebrows raised. “He’s gonna have to learn posture, deportment, dining etiquette, forms of address, and dancing,” she lists off. “ _Minimum_. You said he’s been pouring tea at Pao’s. You know how much work I’m gonna have to do to train the customer service outta him?”

“I’m literally standing right here,” Li puts in irritably, and is promptly ignored.

“You love a con, and this is the con of the century,” Sokka fires back, narrowing his eyes. “You should be paying _us_ for the chance to participate.”

“Can we please not call it a con?” Aang pleads.

“Seconded,” says Katara. Sokka tunes out his sister with the ease of long practice.

“I’m gonna have to travel with you goody-goodies.”

“You’ve been dying to get out of Ba Sing Se,” he counters.

“I’m gonna miss the prelims for Earth Rumble XI.”

“Maybe we can find you some nice firebenders to beat up,” Sokka suggests. “Ooh, you can beat up Li!”

“Hey,” Li protests. “I’m not fighting a blind ten year old, there’s no way that’s fair.”

Sokka, Katara, and Aang wince in unison. An unsettling smile stretches across Toph’s face. “You’re right,” she says, “it isn’t.”

Ten minutes later, Li is holding a block of ice to his forehead and watching Toph warily as she parades around their campground.

“She’s fourteen,” Sokka stage-whispers to him.

“Shut the fuck up,” Li says.

Toph flicks a pebble that hits him in the elbow so hard he drops the block of ice. “First lesson!” she announces. “No swearing!”

Li flops backwards. "I hate it here."

"I know, buddy," Sokka says, pats him on the stomach with a little too much force, and then scrams before Li can get to his feet and retaliate.

*

Toph refuses to work with Li when they're in the air, so it's usually the Sokka-and-Li show all morning and into the afternoon. Evenings are Toph Time. She spends hours poking and prodding at Li, grilling him on how to sit and how to stand and how to breathe and how to bow and how to greet the Fire Lord's third cousin by marriage if he's visiting during the summer or in the winter. There's a difference, apparently.

"Wrong," she says one night, when Li picks up a small stone that Sokka's pretty sure is supposed to represent a knife that, according to Toph, should only ever be used to cut seaweed-based appetizers. They're doing dining etiquette tonight, or trying to. Sokka is observing for entertainment purposes. Li moves his hand to hover over a slightly larger stone.

"Nope," Toph says, before his fingers even make contact. Sokka snickers.

"Are you fucking—" Toph cuts him off with a noise like a buzzer.

"No swearing! Promenade!" she yells.

Li's fists clench, but then he inhales deeply, releases the now-smoky breath in a controlled exhale, gets up, rolls his shoulders and raises his chin slightly, and begins walking in even, slow paces. Sokka knows from experience that Li is acting out of self-preservation; Toph will simply throw rocks at him if he puts up a fight. Even so, it's impressive.

“That’s pedagogy,” he observes sagely.

“What the fuck is pedagogy,” Toph asks, and then sticks a leg out to trip Li as he glides past her again.

"Why do you even know this stuff?" Li groans later that week.

"My family's rich," Toph says shortly. "They entertained a lot."

Sokka, who knows the whole story courtesy of the time they kidnapped Toph so she'd teach Aang how to earthbend, keeps his mouth shut. What Toph wants to share is up to her.

"His posture's weirdly good," she muses to him a few minutes later. "I mean, it's impeccable."

Li wanders over from where he's been helping Katara with lunch and says, without heat, "Stop talking about me."

"Not talking about you, just your freakish posture," Sokka assures him, accepting the cup of tea Li passes him.

"It's always been that way," Li says, and shrugs. "Jia, the woman who raised me, used to say the same thing."

Toph hums. “I just figured it had to do with your, know you." She waggles her fingers. “Blue Spirit stuff.”

Sokka spits out his tea. “His _what_?”

Li looks as shocked as Sokka feels, but probably for different reasons. "How do you even know about that?" he hisses, glancing around nervously like they're not in an uninhabited field in the middle of nowhere.

"Oh, you robbed my parents once when we were in Ba Sing Se," Toph says blithely. "Super cool. I recognized your breathing."

Li appears to be taking a second to process every part of that statement. Sokka, outraged, doesn’t speak to him for the rest of the day.

Okay, so Li's also a vigilante. A vigilante firebender who steals from the rich and gives his spoils to the needy, like some kind of folk hero. And also makes really good tea. Whatever. Whatever!

*

"Is he gonna be ready?" Sokka asks Toph, the afternoon before they enter Fire Nation territory.

She tilts her head to one side, considering, and then nods. "Yep, I'm the best," she says. "He'll be ready." Li, who is squinting tiredly at a stack of flashcards, looks relieved. Then Toph continues. "I can't do clothes, obviously," she says, "unless we want him to look like a colorblind clown," and the relief drops right off his face.

"I'll do it," Sokka says quickly. "When we get to the Fire Nation, we'll stop for supplies and I'll find something appropriate."

Li looks at him, wary. "I can dress myself."

"Can you?" Sokka asks, taking in Li's battered shoes, patched pants, and shirt, which has more than one visible hole in it. Admittedly, the holes are the result of a minor disagreement that ended with both of them toppling off a small cliff and into a thorn bush, but Sokka doesn't bring that up. For a knife-wielding vigilante, Li is strangely clumsy sometimes. Sokka will grudgingly admit that the firebender had the upper hand for a moment, but then Sokka, sweaty and hampered by the restrictive outer layer of his shirt, had stripped it off to gain greater range of motion, Li's eyes had kind of glazed over, and they'd both gone over the edge. _Flexibility_ , Sokka thinks in satisfaction. _The element of surprise._ Li might have the flashy moves, but clearly he just can't match Sokka's innate tactical and observational genius.

Li is flushing, Sokka assumes with anger, no doubt also remembering the scuffle. Sokka beams at him beatifically. "I'll do it," he repeats. The chance to dress Li is too good to pass up.

*

The next day finds them leaving the western edge of the Earth Kingdom, crossing over the Mo Ce Sea. Sokka waits until Appa is soaring easily above the waves before he settles back and shakes out his study schedule, the panels of which unfold to cover half of Appa's saddle. Li glares at it with undisguised hatred, and Katara smothers a laugh. Sokka ignores them both.

"Okay, let's get started," he says, glancing up at Li. The firebender's restless sleep had only awoken him once last night. He'd been able to fall back asleep right after, and hadn't woken up until mid-morning. Looking at Li now, he's pretty sure that's only because Li himself gave up on sleep entirely and spent the night huddled by the campfire. When Sokka had emerged from the tent, all of their supplies had already been repacked, and Appa's coat was looking freshly brushed. Li, on the other hand, looked terrible. "Unless you need to take a break," Sokka offers, "but we really need to get through this—"

"It's fine," Li brushes him off. "What are we on today?"

"The riots."

"How are—literally nobody knows what happened that night, Sokka. How could anyone expect _me_ to know?"

"Because you were there," Sokka reminds him. "The prince was there." Li doesn't have a good response to this. "They're going to ask, so you're just going to have to memorize what we _do_ know." When Li doesn't say anything, Sokka nudges Li's foot with his own. "I know you read the scrolls last night," he says gently. Li blows out a long breath.

"It was summer," he says, "94. Fire Lord Iroh—Uncle Iroh," he corrects himself before Sokka can, "had just abandoned the six-hundred-day siege after the death of Lu Ten. Within days of that news reaching the Caldera, Fire Lord Azulon publicly announced that his younger son Ozai had been removed from the line of succession."

Sokka nods. This part of the story is well-worn, but even so, he notices that the others have stopped talking to listen to Li's recitation. Aang had still been in the iceberg when it happened; he and Katara and Toph had been children. Word of the Fire Nation's upheaval hadn't even reached the South Pole until nearly a year after the war had officially ended, although the tribe had certainly noticed the sudden lack of raiding vessels. Even to Sokka, who's been fascinated by the mysterious circumstances surrounding that night since he learned of them, the story has the feeling of a legend, or a fable—too far-off to have ever happened in their world. Li, growing up in Jang Hui, would have felt the effects of it with much more immediacy.

"Some of the population—some of the guards, some of the Imperial Firebenders—were loyal to Ozai, not to the throne. With the announcement of Iroh's retreat, it was—too much. The night after Azulon denounced him, the riots began." Li has a good voice for storytelling, low and a little hoarse, like he's confiding a secret, but something about hearing this particular story on his tongue feels bad in a way Sokka can't fully explain. He's not even looking at them, instead gazing past Sokka into the deep blue of the ocean beneath them. "A lot of people died. Palace guards, advisors, council members, servants in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then the foreign trade minister found Azulon's body in the throne room, with a spilled goblet of wine on the floor beside him." He licks his lips. "The violence spread to the streets outside the imperial district. People began fleeing the city. Some reports said that Prince Ozai and his wife were seen fighting in one of the palace hallways, before the fire started. When it was done—almost the entire royal line was gone. In one night. The riots continued for days, until Iroh returned."

"What about the prince and the princess?" Toph sounds young, and frightened, and Sokka abruptly wishes that they'd tested this part of Li's memorization somewhere else.

Li tangles his fingers together so tightly that his knuckles turn white. "They, uh. They never recovered the bodies. But the fire started in the prince's chamber, according to the official report. That whole wing of the palace burned to the ground. Including the princess's quarters. So even if they hadn't been in their rooms—even if they'd woken up, they couldn't have—"

"But weren't they firebenders?" Aang asks. Katara is looking at Li, wide-eyed.

"They were children," he rasps. "Azula was only nine. They didn't know _how_. The fire was too big, too much. And they—they were scared. They were terrified," he says, so quietly Sokka can barely make out the words.

Sokka clears his throat. "I think that's probably good for today," he says.

They spend the rest of the morning in silence.


	4. Chapter 4

After the morning's conversation, none of them have much of an appetite. Appa needs to rest, though, so they pick a small island, barely more than a large rock with some bushes on it, and Aang turns the bison loose to munch on its reed-like grass.

“I think we'll be able to get to Jang Hui by early evening,” Sokka judges. He’s squinting at their map, which is spread out on a flat rock. Li leans too far over in an effort to see for himself and has to catch himself on Sokka's shoulder. When Sokka speaks again, his voice is a little strangled. “Does it have an inn?” At Li's nod, he announces, “I vote we get a room.”

"Me too," Katara mutters.

"What?"

Katara blinks back innocently. Sokka regards her with a suspicious look but lets it go. "Ooh, what about shopping?" he asks, rolling up the map and tucking it safely into his bag.

"There's not much," Li says apologetically. "Jang Hui is really small. There are some shops, but they mostly sell fish."

"We'll wait 'til Ember Island," says Katara. "I think we could all do with a change of clothes. And a proper bath."

"Speak for yourself," Toph snorts.

“Why were you in Ba Sing Se, anyway?” Aang asks. “That’s nowhere near Jang Hui.”

Li tosses his travel bag in a high arc so that it lands in Appa's saddle before he reaches down into his boot and pulls out a knife.

“Was that in there the whole time?” Sokka squawks, but Li’s already handing it to Aang, hilt first.

“Read the inscription,” he instructs.

“ _Never give up without a fight_."

“What?” Li says. “No, flip it over.”

Aang does. “ _Made in Earth Kingdom_. Oh.”

“It’s the only thing I had when Jia found me,” he tells them. "It was the best clue I had to where I came from." In fact, it had been the only clue, besides his firebending. The knife was Earth Kingdom-made; maybe he was, too.

He knew it wasn't likely. _Firebender like you_ , Jia had said, _with those eyes... no way you're Earth Kingdom_. But there were plenty of Fire Nation colonies there, remnants of the hundred-year war that had settled into the land and dug their feet in. Li had thought that maybe—maybe his parents were colonists, or refugees—and wasn't Ba Sing Se the city of refuge, sheltering whole populations? Nothing had come of it. The city's immigration records were extensive, but even they couldn't produce answers from thin air. Li didn't even know how old he was, let alone which colony his parents might have been coming from, and no matter how many weapons shops and stalls he visited, no one had ever recognized the knife.

*

Toph, unsurprisingly, hates Jang Hui.

"Nope. No way," she refuses, before both of her bare feet have even left Appa's back to settle on the dock. Li wants to hit himself. Out here, in the middle of the river, Toph really is blind; there's nothing under her feet but wood and water.

"Shit," he says, "I'm sorry, Toph, I wasn't thinking." It's a sign of how off-kilter she feels that Toph doesn't bother to call him out on the swearing.

"This place is a nightmare," she scowls instead.

" _You're_ a nightmare," he says automatically, and it's enough to earn him a smile.

"Yeah, a nightmare who's gonna find some solid ground for the night."

"I'll come with you," Aang offers, scritching Momo between the ears. "I don't think there's enough room for Appa here." Katara looks torn, but eventually she decides to accompany the younger two.

"Don't kill each other," she instructs from atop the bison. "No shenanigans. And definitely no tomfoolery." Katara points two fingers at her own eyes and then jabs them in Sokka's direction.

"Why are you looking at me?" he protests.

"You know why," she says darkly. Appa swims off to the sound of Sokka's grumbling.

This leaves the two of them standing alone on the dock, which is bobbing wildly in the wake created by Appa's exit. Sokka makes a noise of distress as a wave of water splashes across his shoes. "You know,” he says, taking in the ramshackle assemblage of fishing skiffs and houseboats that make up the village, "I never would have picked this as your hometown."

Li tries to look at Jang Hui with the eyes of someone who didn’t grow up here. The air smells like fish and spice and river water; silvery scales flash in the sun where they’re scattered on the dock beneath Li’s feet. The river is blue like the cloudless summer sky above them, and beyond the reed-thatched rooftops of the town buildings, distant hills stretch up and up and up, verdant and lush. Nearby, a cormorant spreads its oil-black wings out to dry. It probably doesn’t look like much to the Avatar and his companions, but it was his home for six years. The first time he set foot on solid ground—the first time he remembers, anyway—he almost stumbled, used to the slight pitch and roll of the floating docks that make up Jang Hui’s streets.

“It's not my hometown. Well, not really. I grew up here, kind of?”

Sokka does not look impressed.

Li tries again. “Nobody knows where I came from. Jia found me when she went out to fish one morning and took me in until I got old enough to leave.”

It hadn’t been a bad childhood, Li thinks, though admittedly he doesn’t have much to compare it to. Jia had been kind and had done her best to make sure he attended school, got enough to eat, and had somewhere to sleep that was sheltered and dry, or at least as dry as Jang Hui ever really got. Her small house was more like a cabin than anything else and they were constantly knocking elbows and knees, but he has warm memories of her wrinkled hands correcting his own smaller ones as he attempted to mend the fishing nets.

“Is she here?” Sokka asks interestedly. Li steers them in the direction of the town center, which is less of a center and more of a congested assemblage of docks, general stores, and shrines. “Maybe we can visit her!”

Li is already shaking his head. “She died," he says. "Right before I left for the Earth Kingdom."

Sokka falls quiet for a moment, serious in a way he rarely is. "That must have been hard." Li shrugs. It hadn't been, really, or at least that's what he tells himself. He knows Jia didn't love him; she'd never had children, never wanted them, but had felt a sense of duty to the burned and bedraggled boy she pulled out of the water that morning. He didn't begrudge her for it then, and he certainly doesn't now.

As a child, he'd wished... well. It didn't truly matter. He'd understood, even at that young age, that in receiving Jia's help he'd been given more than many others got. When she died, he stayed long enough to ensure she was given the proper last rites, that her body was treated with care and respect. He sold her house and her fishing nets. And then he departed Jang Hui the next day.

It feels strange to be back here. He's only been gone for two years, maybe closer to three, but it's long enough; compared to Ba Sing Se, it looks less like a town and more like a collection of driftwood that got caught on a sandbar and grew legs. It's smaller than he remembers.

*

Jang Hui actually has two inns, he informs Sokka as they walk, but only one of them is worth the price.

"River lice," he says ominously. Sokka doesn't push for more detail.

They get a room. The inn is on the far side of the town, where there are fewer stilts to support and stabilize the buildings. Instead, most of the structures are distributed across a number of pitch-sealed wooden platforms, buoyed by air pockets beneath and connected by thin walkways. The inn is small, just a single central room and three sleeping chambers on adjacent platforms, and they pay for the last available room just as the sun begins to set.

There's only one bed, because of course there is. This is just Li's life now. Sokka seems unfazed, crowing about spending a night with a real roof over their heads, eating food that he didn't have to catch and skin or shell or peel or de-scale by hand first. He looks a heartbeat away from throwing himself on top of the bedcovers and rolling around on them. His enthusiasm is... it’s not contagious, but Li's looking forward to sleeping on an actual mattress, even if it's stuffed with dried river grass.

"Bed," Sokka says rapturously. Bed, singular. Any minute now, Li is gonna get over this. 

"Food first," he says, because he's hungry and because he wants to see if his favorite stall is still around. If there's one thing Jang Hui does well, it's seafood. 

Tan is still in business, as it turns out, though his prices have gone up since Li was last here. They get dinner at his stall in the town's center, fried fish wrapped in reedpaper, and eat it as they walk, watching the colored dockside lanterns flicker on one by one. Their warm reflections throw lines of yellow and red across the darkening river as Sokka describes the South Pole to him. He gestures expansively and jumps from subject to subject: the ribbons of starlight that wind through the southern sky like a veil; the thrill of ice dodging; his and Katara's childhood fights; the time his mother brought home an injured polar bear dog and she and his father stayed up all night to nurse it back to health. It's the kind of thing that Li would usually try to tune out, not out of disinterest but because it hurts, a little, to hear the personal details of something so foreign to him, something he's only allowed himself to want in his weakest moments.

It feels different, with Sokka. Both more and less painful.

He wants to offer up details of his own family, and finds himself with nothing besides an exhaustive list of royal trivia and a handful of childish fantasies.

 _My sister hated dolls too_ , he wants to say, but no—that's the princess Azula. Li doesn't even know if he had any siblings at all, let alone a younger sister like Katara. _My mother used to sing me to sleep each night. There was a pond, in the sun, where we used to play._ It sounds like a child's wish list, a humiliating record of his most deeply buried desires, rather than anything real. How many times had he imagined these people, these feelings—this certainty that he was loved, and cherished, and cared for? He built the daydreams from the ground up, a patchwork structure made in the image of other people's happiness. It's been years since he's done it, but it doesn't matter. The daydreams crept into the barren expanses of his memory, and now two are indistinguishable.

"Tell me about Gran-Gran," he asks, and Sokka does.

"I always—I always wanted that," he says in a quiet voice, much later that night when they're both lying in the too-small bed, full and exhausted from the day. "I wanted a family."

Sokka sounds stricken. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"

"No, it's fine," Li says, made honest by his sleepiness, by the darkness of the room. "I like hearing about it." About you, he doesn't say. "I'm glad—I'm really glad you had that." _You deserve a beautiful family_ , he thinks, and imagines he hears Sokka's voice say _You deserve it, too_ before sleep drags him under.

*

Li dreams of Jang Hui. This dream is different from the others, which come in disjointed flashes and nonsensical impressions. This one is perfectly coherent, and all the more awful because of it. In this dream, he is lying on a half-submerged raft in the middle of the river, well before dawn. He cannot feel the sun and the raft dips and bobs with his every shift, sending water sloshing across his ruined face. He hurts so badly he wishes he were dead.

Eventually the sky lightens: first from inky darkness to a bruised blue, then from the pink of a moon peach to the clear, soft blue of dawn. The clouds that scud across it are perfectly formed and luminous, limned in golden light like the painted ones that adorned the folding screens in his bedchamber. The sun eases over the horizon, and the touch of it burns.

The raft comes to rest against something solid. Li opens his eyes.

Sokka's face is hovering above him, its shadows made strange by the moonlight that filters in through the window. His hair is down and tousled, and there's a crease on his cheek from the blanket they share. The floor underneath them dips a little when he shifts his weight. Li's stomach rolls with it.

He forces himself not to cover his scar. "Sorry," he says hoarsely. "Did I wake you?"

"No," Sokka lies. "Are you okay?"

"Just a bad dream," he says, and rolls over so he's facing the wall, away from Sokka's gaze.

There's a moment of silence, and Li fears—hopes—fears Sokka will say something else. He doesn't. Instead, a weight comes to rest against the center of Li's back, a fixed point of warmth. It's Sokka's hand, he realizes. Neither of them speaks for a long time, and eventually, Li slips back into sleep.

In the morning, they don't talk about it. They pack up their few belongings and head out to meet Aang and the others at the large dock.

"How was the inn?" Katara asks, looking between them with an odd expression on her face.

"Luxurious," Sokka says, which is mostly a lie. "Best fish I've ever had," which probably isn't.

They stop on yet another uninhabited island that afternoon, this one shaded by a large grove of ume trees heavy with ripe apricots. Momo scampers off immediately, his tail whipping in excitement. Instead of cooking, they each pick a handful of the fruits while Sokka parcels out the fresh sticky buns they purchased from the baker in Jang Hui.

After they eat, Toph flops backwards onto the ground, starfishing until she's taking up as much space as possible and wiggling her toes into the dirt. "I'm never leaving," she announces, and proceeds to fall asleep.

Nobody protests; even Sokka folds up his now-battered study schedule and splays himself out in the shade. The air is hot but Aang, one arm bent behind his head, bends a fresh breeze around them with a lazy twirl of his finger. Katara is busy picking the tiny white wildflowers that dot the forest floor and putting them in Sokka's wolftail.

Li, who has positioned himself in the sun-warmed grass just outside of the grove, feels his eyelids growing heavy. Well-fed and sleepy, it takes him a moment to realize that Katara has moved to sit behind him and is doing... something... with his hair. He makes an inquisitive noise, opening one eye to look up at her. She's haloed by the sun, her own hair half-tied back in a topknot, and when she combs her fingers through his hair again, he has to stop himself from pushing up into it. It's been a long time since anyone touched him this casually, Toph's affectionate (and not-so-affectionate) punches aside.

"It's getting long," she observes. He hums in agreement, and lets his eyes slide shut against the heat.

In the sunless depths of his dream, a woman's frantic face looms over him, mouthing words he can't hear. There is shouting, sound devoid of meaning, and fire, so close to his face it's burning the skin, the muscle—his eye— _Agni_. There is movement in the dark.

He wakes up, again, and it takes his gaze a while to focus on the blades of grass poking out of the soil next to his face. He's alone. When he closes his left eye, his vision sharpens. The scar's been there ever since he can remember, literally, but he knows he wasn't born with it. He blows out a shaky breath, and then draws another in slowly. Lets that one out too. Tries to come back to himself, to the Li who knows when and where and who he is. The grass ripples in the wind; Katara's bright laugh rings out in the distance.

After a few minutes, he stands up and goes to find the others. When he ducks into the ume grove it's to find Toph and Sokka standing shoulder-to-shoulder—well, shoulder-to-chest; Toph's short—waiting for him with matching serious expressions. Sokka's is ruined by the mustache that wiggles every time he twitches his nose.

"No," Li says immediately, the last shreds of his nightmare vanishing into an entirely different kind of horror. "Absolutely not."

"Time for Visiting Dignitary practice," announces Toph, ignoring him entirely. Li _hates_ Visiting Dignitary practice, partially because he sucks at small talk, but mostly because— 

"It's me, Visiting Dignitary Wang Fire," says Sokka.

Li makes a pained noise. Toph rolls her eyes.

"Shouldn't we be leaving?" he tries.

"Wang here is visiting from—someplace in the boonies. What's the boonies of the Fire Nation?"

"Jang Hui," Sokka suggests with a sideways glance at Li. Li jabs him in the side. Sokka pokes him back. It devolves into an undignified wrestling contest that ends with the mustache trampled into the ground and Li sitting triumphantly on top of him, chest heaving and face filthy from where Sokka threw mud at him, because Sokka is a dirty, dirty cheater. They're both already fairly sweaty and unwashed, so the overall effect isn't great.

"Shu Jin," Li offers, smug, and clambers off Sokka, who gives a dramatic _oof_.

"Whatever. Minister Wang Fire from Shu Jin has entered the audience chamber."

Sokka shakes the bedraggled mustache out and pointedly reattaches it to his face before he bows, adding a decidedly non-standard flourish. He smirks at Li and Li resists the urge to jump on him again. Ugh. He _hates_ this.

"Welcome to the Caldera," he says stiffly.

"Welcome to the Caldera, Minister..." Toph coaches, grinning.

"Minister... Fire," Li grits out. Sokka beams.

"No stabbing," Toph reminds them. "How 'bout that weather?"

They force him to make small talk until Katara takes mercy and comes over to chivvy them all up onto Appa. It's horrible enough that Li finds himself forgetting about his dreams almost entirely. He suspects, from the expression he catches on Sokka's face in between his jibes and arguments, that that was Sokka's intention all along.


End file.
